A Free VOIP Service that Will Grow With You

Starting today, Phonebooth will offer a free service geared towards individuals. The company also announced the general availability of its $20/month/user option, which offers a fully featured phone system in the cloud. One of the advantages of using Phonebooth over similar services like Google Voice or Grasshopper is that the company allows users to upgrade their phone system over time. Once your company outgrows Phonebooth's basic plan, you can easily switch to a higher-end phone system (Phonebooth on Demand) with hardware IP-based phones.

Phonebooth's users will be able to choose local numbers from virtually everywhere in the U.S. (the service us U.S.). Sadly, though, there is no way to make your Phonebooth number appear on the caller ID for outgoing calls from your landline or cell phone. Phonebooth doesn't currently offer any mobile apps, though the company told us earlier today that mobile apps are definitely on Phonebooth's roadmap.

Contact Plus Widget

In addition to the free VOIP service, Phonebooth is also launching a new widget for small businesses - Contact Us Plus - that allows potential customers to use Phonebooth's VOIP service to initiate a call right from the website. In addition to initiating phone calls, the Phonebooth widget can also feature additional contact info (Twitter account, email etc.), as well as your address and a map. Phonebooth's users can also opt to show phone numbers for different departments in their company in the widget.

Enjoysthin.gs lets you share all kinds of media, from images to videos to quotes to audio you call in and record from your phone. The interface is beautiful and the site is a real joy to use.

The user experience on the site is a real home run; from browsing through the beautifully displayed items from other users to interacting with the site's basic functionality. Creating an account is remarkably smooth and the plush, over-sized displays make us want to jump up and down and clap our hands.

Anyone can tag items, even those saved by other people, and you can view recent shared items globally by tag. Recent activities by your friends are displayed as another item in a big box when you are logged in. There's even an API for integration with outside services; though we dare anyone to try to make a cooler interface, it would be nice to see Enjoysthin.gs on FriendFeed.

There are clearly more features that are still needed, there are no RSS feeds or ways to view the most popular items, for example. Roden is hard at work improving the site, he added 31 new features in December alone. The new feature that lets you call in a voice recording is very cool - a message we recorded was posted to our profile page in just a few minutes.

You can befriend me at Enjoysthin.gs on this page. I'll probably be using the service for at least the next few days. Not because it's particularly popular, secure, supportive of data portability or anything like that - just because it's so damn much fun to use.

It may finally be time I did something about that compulsive swearing issue, unless I want some seriously skewed search results. But that may only be the beginning.

My biggest fear, though, is that we'll lose something far more precious than the nuance and subtlety of the human voice - and that's the ability to yell at a recalcitrant device with impunity. There's profound satisfaction in telling your computer to go screw itself, without worrying that it might attempt to comply with the instruction.

More Noise to Signal

In fact this is already starting to happen, as recent iPhone releases from Google and Say Where show.

Will all this happen in 5 years? While at least one Slashdot commenter thinks it'll be more like 15 years, we see plenty of evidence of voice recognition software on the Web already. Just a week or so ago Google released an update of its Google Mobile App for the iPhone (iTunes link), which included voice recognition to translate voice commands into search queries. In our tests, we found the voice recognition to be very accurate. Google also offers voice search through GOOG-411 and Yahoo and other information providers offer similar services. There are a whole host of talking search engines in fact. Also, we're seeing voice apps from startups - such as the Say Where iPhone application (our review).

Here are the full 5 predictions from IBM:

• Energy saving solar technology will be built into asphalt, paint and windows
• You will have a crystal ball for your health
• You will talk to the Web . . . and the Web will talk back
• You will have your own digital shopping assistants
• Forgetting will become a distant memory

Note: the description in iTunes has not been updated yet, but if you follow this link, you can just download and install the new version.

This new capability takes the Google Mobile App for the iPhone from a rather bland search application to a whole new level. Now, you can just say something like "sushi in Portland" or "movie showtimes" and the application will return a highly relevant set of results. In order to be useful, voice recognition has to be extremely accurate, and here, the new Google Mobile App delivers.

The app also makes use of the iPhone's built-in GPS and always returns local results together with the standard Google search results whenever these could be relevant. For us, this worked especially well when we searched for restaurants or stores.

Surprisingly, the app also did quite well when we search for relatively complex addresses, though it didn't automatically take us to Google Maps, which would have been really nice.

It also helps that Google has updated the way it displays search results in the app, with easy ways to get directions or call a restaurant directly from the app.

Interestingly, the apps seems to be doing the voice recognition on the phone itself. Most of Google's competitors first record a sound file, then send it to a server, and then return results. Doing the number crunching locally makes for a faster search experience, especially when using the EDGE network.

The only functionality that is missing is the ability to search your contacts and make phone calls directly from the app, but chances are that there are technical reasons for this (names tend to be a hard problem for voice recognition programs).

Easier Than Typing

Google, of course, already offers voice search through GOOG-411 (and Yahoo and other information providers offer similar services). Also, other iPhone applications like Say Where (iTunes link) already offer voice recognition (though our experience with that application was decisively mixed).

Overall, however, Google's iPhone application works better and faster than any of its competitors. Most voice recognition programs have some issues with unusual accents, and the Google Mobile App is no exception. However, when it works, it works extremely well and using it to search for information is actually easier and faster than having to type a query.

The new chat functionality will work on PCs with Windows XP or Vista, as well as on Macs with OS X 10.4 or later. The plugin will work with all the major browsers, including Google's own Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari.

We have not been able to test the video and voice quality of these chats yet, but we will update this post once we get a chance to try it out for ourselves.

Skype?

Interestingly, Google Talk, Google's desktop chat program does not have any video functionality yet, though Google enabled voice chat for Google Talk a long time ago. By adding voice and video chat, Google is clearly going up against Skype, which has made video chat one of its main features in the latest version of its software.

Microsoft Office

Out of the two announcements, Microsoft's is probably the least exciting, but, on the other hand, there is a good chance that it will see a lot more actual use than JaJah's voice translation. The Microsoft Research Machine Translation team has just released this update to MS Office 2003 and 2007 to the Office team for integration, but they already offer instructions on their blog for setting this up yourself without having to wait for the official update.

The integration with Windows Live Translator allows you to translate English texts into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, German, Italian, Arabic, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish, as well as vice versa. We have tested the Windows Live Translator and the translations were generally about as accurate as you would expect from machine translations. There are various mistakes and words it doesn't recognize, but overall, the translation is relatively readable and gives you at least some impression of the original text.

JaJah Babel

JaJah Babel is clearly the sexier product of the two. You can call access numbers in the U.S., England, or Australia, and after a voice prompt, you simply speak the text you want to be translated into Mandarin. The service will then replay your message, you acknowledge the accuracy of the input, and after a short delay, you will hear the translation. Given our general lack of knowledge when it comes to Mandarin here, we can't vouch for the accuracy of the translation, but the service itself worked very well and seemed to understand at least our initial input accurately.

If you are in China, of course, the fact that you have to call an international number to get this to work is a bit of a limitation.

Other Translation Services

There seems to be quite an interest in working on consumer oriented translation services right now. Just yesterday, we wrote about Mloovi, which translates RSS feeds trough Google Translate, and earlier last month, we wrote about the collaborative dictionary and translation service Lingro.

Babel Fish

JaJah's product is especially interesting here because it takes speech as its input and it will get even more interesting once it works for other languages beyond Mandarin as well. JaJah is offering this service based on IBM's technology, and given IBM's expertise in doing voice-to-voice translation, it will probably only be a matter of time before we see support for more languages. Besides other projects, IBM already supports the U.S. Army with an English to Iraqi Arabic translation service.

There has always been a lot of hype around the possibilities of instant voice translations, but very few products were ever good enough to make it in the consumer/business market. JaJah represents a major step forward here, even if its voice prompts make the service a bit less frictionless than the science-fiction ideal if autmated, instant translation.

In addition to the local phone numbers for 17 additional countries, Utterz is also launching threaded conversations (small but important), webcam video capture and a newly designed site. The cow motif will likely stay, but whatever. (Update: Upon seeing the relaunched site, there's actually a whole lot less cow action! I kind of miss the cow, now that it's gone.)

On Seesmic

Utterz has far more features than Seesmic and is also very well thought out, at times. It's not as slick and usable as Seesmic. You can fall off a log and participate in Seesmic, once you've gotten access to the closed alpha at least (and gotten over any aversion you have to Silicon Valley hype). The feature gap is big enough, really, that the two may as well be different services. Seesmic is a good place to go and have short video conversations. Utterz is a service you can use to have more complicated and flexible conversations in mixed media. With Utterz you can post an audio message first to your account, then edit the message to add images and text, then have it all appear as a blog post on your off-site blog ten minutes later. That's pretty cool.

Growing Utterz

When I asked Utterz though what their path to market would be, they told me it would be "focusing on a particular set of topical interests, like political dialog." Snore.

The strangely disconcerting anti-hero cow mascot and the general clunkyness of the site aside, though, Utterz is a good service. Once users get used to using it, though, I think many will like it quite a bit. Enabling users in 17 additional countries to come on board is a great move and one I'm sure RWW readers will appreciate.

The list of newly included countries follows:
Australia, Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.